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Butter Scotch
Fanny Waggoner.
Three tablespoons of molasses, two of sugar, two of water, one of butter; add a pinch of soda before taking up.
A four-ingredient molasses toffee, written for a cook who already knew what candy-making looked like. Everything hinges on the temperature you take it to, which the original never states.
- The hinge: cook to hard crackBoil the syrup to about 300F on a candy thermometer (hard crack is usually given as 300-310F), or until a drop in cold water shatters rather than bends. Much below that it stays chewy and tacky; boiled well past it the molasses scorches and turns bitter.
- Scale of the batchEight tablespoons of liquid total is half a cup, which yields a thin sheet perhaps 6 inches square and serves two or three people. Doubling or tripling is straightforward, but expect a longer boil.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is more bitter than the table molasses of the 1870s. Sorghum syrup was also widely used in American households of the period and would not be out of place.
- SodaThe pinch of soda added at the end aerates the candy slightly and softens the bite. It foams up hard the moment it goes in, so use a pan several times the depth of the syrup and stir it through quickly off the heat.
- "Before taking up"This means immediately before pouring out. Have a buttered marble slab, shallow tin, or parchment-lined sheet ready in advance; the syrup sets within a minute or two.
- ScoringMark the sheet into squares with an oiled knife while it is still warm and pliable, then snap along the lines once cold. Cutting cold candy just shatters it at random.
- StorageWrap the pieces individually in waxed paper and keep them airtight. Molasses candy pulls moisture from the air and the pieces will weld into one mass by the next day otherwise.
Butterscotch as a boiled sugar-and-butter sweet is generally traced to early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, and Doncaster in particular is the town most often credited with it; the "scotch" in the name is usually explained as scoring or scotching the cooled sheet into squares rather than any Scottish origin, though this is traditional lore rather than settled fact. The American version here leans on molasses, the everyday sweetener of the period. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women and sold for charity, which is why a five-line candy arrives credited to Fanny Waggoner. Such books assumed a reader who had watched candy made since childhood, so the crucial detail, how far to boil it, went unwritten.